SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES, I #1 (Spring 1973): 33-37.

Marc Angenot

Jules Verne and French Literary Criticism

From the first studies of the so-called merveilleux scientifique
in such essays as J. Aubry’s “Le roman moderne d’hypothèse scientifique”
(La Revue des Idées, 1906 No. 37) to the latest monograph by Henri
Baudin, La science-fiction (Paris 1971), all French students of SF
have granted a prominent position to those works of Jules Verne published
under the collective title Les voyages extraordinaires, Most of
them regard the thirty novels and stories as a limit a-quo of
modern SF and social utopia. This opinion has been reinforced by the fact
that such SF writers of the early 20th century as Paul d’Ivoi, Gaston
Lerouge, Maurice Renard, and Jean de la Hire fell rapidly into discredit
and seemed doomed to oblivion (though some of them are being rediscovered
today). This essay will survey the most significant works published in
French on Verne, with emphasis on certain recent publications.

At first sight Verne’s life appears to have been that of a grand
bourgeois of the provinces. He lived in Picardy during the main part
of his career, and his novels were all first published in a quite
reputable and safe family periodical, the famous Magasin d’Education
et de Récréation of his publisher and friend J.V. Hetzel. But after
Verne’s death in 1905, scholars were refused access to his archives, and
the Verne family showed such jealous discretion that important episodes
in his life are still veiled in shadow. The standard biography, Jules
Verne: Sa Vie et son oeuvre (Paris 1928), by Mme. Allotte de la Fuÿe,
Verne’s niece, though useful, fails to clear up many of the mysteries.

Verne’s work also seems simple and clear at first sight. For a long time
critics tended to measure its merits by its accuracy in technological
prophecy, ignoring both the archaic aspects of Verne’s “inventions” and
the glaring technical contradictions and impossibilities on which they
were often based.

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Present-day critics are studying Verne’s imaginative gifts, narrative
techniques, and world view, passing over the illusory scientific or
parascientific value of the novels, which has at last come to be
considered simply irrelevant. Nobody today would try to link Verne’s
originality with his so-called prophecies. Moreover, it has become
obvious that he was not even the first writer to orchestrate scientific
themes that had previously lain fallow. Pierre Versins, the indefatigable
Swiss student of SF and utopia has clearly demonstrated that all of
Verne’s inventions—travel to the moon, submarine ships, artificial
satellites, live fossils, super explosives, serial vehicles—had been
described in previous utopian romances. Verne’s genius is not to be found
in the origination of discrete concepts.

Before World War II Verne was generally considered a paraliterary
phenomenon, and his admirers, gathered around the “fanzine” Bulletin
de la Société Jules Verne (1935-1938), saw themselves as a small
group of passionate amateurs. But already in the mid-20s the surrealists
had drawn attention to the place Verne deserves among the great
imaginative writers. It is interesting to set certain obsessive
situations in Verne’s narrative side by side with recurrent images in
surrealism: the subterranean world, the city seen as a Gothic-novel
castle, the voyage to the abyss, the land of plenty, the undeciphered
message, etc. Such interest bore fruit during and after World War, II,
when three comprehensive studies were published in rapid succession:
Bernard Frank, Jules Verne et ses Voyages (Paris 1941); René
Escaich, Voyage à travers le monde vernien (Brussels 1951); and
Ghislain de Diesbach, Le tour de Jules Verne en 80 livres (Paris
1969).

Critics now began to study the novels in terms of myth, and sometimes
from an ambiguous psychoanalytical point of view. In the 1950s, instead
of what had been considered a pedagogical picture of scientific progress
ad usum delphini, they began to discover a secret work developing
along the ritual steps of initiation: preliminary purification, perilous
travel, ordeal, attaining the point suprême, death and
transfiguration. Pure fantasy is clearly rejected by the author of Le
Château des Carpathes (The Carpathian Castle), for the enigma always
yields to a rationalist explanation. Unlike Wells or E. R. Burroughs,
Verne has no sympathy with telepathy, spiritism, parapsychology—and yet
his imagery, even though hidden by a positivist and didactic phraseology,
goes far beyond the most unbridled dreamings of his contemporaries.

The reader of Voyage au centre de la terre (Journey to the Center of
the Earth) is enthralled by the inimitable didactic tone of the
passages that explain the theory of central fire, the geology the
carboniferous age, or the habits of the great reptiles—a tone that
transfigures the most pedestrian lecture into a kind of mysterious
incantation. But in the romanesque episodes the reader also discovers a
secret message analogous to the message of the parchment that induced
Professor Liddenbrock and his nephew to plunge into the crater.

Grottoes, subterranean passages, caves, abysses: the images of hidden
depths are repeated in many of the novels. And in Vernean initiatory
travel, truth is nocturnal, subterranean, locked up in shadows. This
theme has been studied by Michel Butor, a novelist of the first rank and
a critic who has reflected shrewdly on the nature of narrative. His essay
in

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Répertoire I (Paris 1962). “Le point suprême et l’Age d’or à
travers quelques oeuvres de Jules Verne” contributed greatly to the
recognition of Verne’s genius. This theme has also been tackled by S.
Vierne: “Deux voyages initiatiques en 1864: Laura de George Sand
et le Voyage au centre de la terre” in Mélanges George Sand
(Paris 1969). In addition to Journey to the Center of the Earth
Verne wrote at least three other extremely interesting examples of the
initiatory romance: The Adventures of Captain Hatteras, The
Carpathian Castle, and Black Indies.

Marcel Moré has written two pioneering volumes of essays: Le très
curieux Jules Verne and Nouvelles explorations de Jules Verne
(Paris 1960 and 1963). His method is difficult to define. He seems to
apply himself at one moment to a narrow biographical problem and at
another to a conventional theme: Verne and the sea, Verne and music. But
Moré is never banal: facing a writer who so often used the cryptogram
motive, he evidently started with the conviction that there was a cypher
to be found in the Voyages, underground strata to
explore—concealed signs and secret passages connecting the ill-known life
of the novelist with his work. If Moré is from time to time questionable,
he is always stimulating.

Moré made a valuable contribution to Verne studies by demonstrating that
Verne’s sources were not confined to the scientific literature of his
time. It is of course important that Verne read scientific journals
carefully, but it is more striking to find in his novels the influence
of—or even references to—utopian socialists like Fourier and Saint-Simon,
German and English romanticists, or Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Bakunin.

Moré insists upon a parallel between Verne and Villiers de l’Isle Adam. A
contemporary of Goncourt and Maupassant, Auguste de Villiers de l’Isle
Adam (1838-1889) can be considered the last true representative of
romantic fantasy, the last Gothic novelist. His novel L’Eve future
(which deals with an artificial woman fashioned by Thomas A. Edison—or
rather, a romanesque, mysterious, and far from historical avatar of the
famous American engineer) combines in a fascinating way scientific themes
(the use of electricity, the building of a robot) and romantic dreamings
(Edison’s laboratory having become a sort of Castle of Otranto, Villiers
rediscovers the themes of the Liebestod, the eternal feminine,
etc.). The confrontation of the author of The Future Eve with the
author of The Carpathian Castle, a very similar novel, is quite
revealing. Such confrontations could be extended, and one could find a
place for Verne among such 19th Century writers as Charles Fourier,
Eugène Sue, Barbey d’Aurevilly, Gobineau, Léon Bloy—all ambiguous social
visionaries, politically reactionary in many respects, but still rebels,
radical social critics, and dauntless aesthetic innovators.

Pierre Macherey has made an interesting but questionable contribution to
the Marxist interpretation of Verne in Pour une théorie de la
production littéraire (Paris 1966), which contains both a chapter on
Verne and one on Defoe as Verne’s “thematic ancestor”. In the differences
between Robinson Crusoe and The Mysterious Island, Macherey
finds a changing bourgeois ideology with respect to technology and man’s
power over nature. More important—for our purposes—is the fact that
Macherey takes Verne’s novels as a means of exemplifying and illustrating
a thesis on links between ideology and narrative. He sets out to find a
method that would allow the literary theoretician, first to detect the
unique

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“ideological project” that has determined the central topic of the work
under study (in Verne’s case, “man’s rule over nature”), then to describe
the figuration imaginaire and symbolic system put into the service
of that project, and finally to produce some hypotheses on the
interaction of ideology and narration. But Macherey’s theories are
disappointing when put into practice. He remains within a very
simple-minded, vulgar Marxist, Plekhanovian tradition, somewhat
refurbished on the surface. The result is a simplification of the links
that probably do connect the author’s imagery with his world view and
ideological themes.

A socio-political study that I find much more relevant than Macherey’s is
Jean Chesneaux’s Lecture politique de Jules Verne (Paris 1971).
Chesneaux does not deny the importance of Verne’s interests in science
and technology, or in theoretical, somewhat whimsical speculations, but
he argues that these interests are subordinated to a “comprehensive
political analysis of man’s relation to nature”. He studies the political
ideologies with which Verne’s work is embued, ideologies to which
attention had previously been drawn only in Kenneth Allott’s
English-language study, Jules Verne (London 1943). He
distinguishes the influence of the 1848 style of humanitarian socialism,
the presence of some Fourierist and Saint-Simonian topics, the expression
of an ambiguous anticolonialism combined with a virulent Anglophobia
(Measuring a Meridian, Off on a Comet). Behind his surface
bourgeois conservatism, Jules Verne—a very secret man, as Moré has
pointed out—concealed audacious political views.

Intended first of all for a teen-age audience and apparently dedicated to
a pedagogical glorification of moderate and positive bourgeois values,
Verne’s narratives incurred no reproaches from the educators of his time.
Even so, it is not difficult to find in them a network of themes and
theses tending toward socialism, phalansterism, or even anarchism. The
grand bourgeois of Picardy, anticommunard and antidreyfusite in
his correspondence, produced a work which glorifies social rebellion and
political revolution, a work in which Captain Nemo, Robur the Conqueror,
Mathias Sandorf, and Kaw Dzher rise up against a besotted, enslaved, and
condemned society. In Robur the Conqueror, and even more clearly
in Mathias Sandorf, Verne rediscovers the narrative structure of
the romantic popular novel: deliberately separated from society, the
Promethean hero sets out as knight-errant and avenger to redeem the
social order he has condemned by rescuing the oppressed and punishing the
villains.

There have also been various attempts at a formalist reading and
structural description of Verne’s work, which has proved intriguing to
many of the critics involved in the radical renewal of literary theory in
France in the last ten years. In 1966 there was a special Jules Verne
issue of L’Arc (No. 29) with essays by Jean Roudaut, Michel
Foucault, and Michel Serres, and in 1970 there were essays by Serres
(Critique, April) and Roland Barthes (Poetique, No.1).
These critics insist on a very subtle system of transformations, a set of
motives immanent to the text, and often tend to a mythical explanation.
In his L’Arc essay (p 18), Serres argues that Verne “collected and
hid under the sediments of picturesque exoticism and up-to-date science,
almost the whole European tradition of mythology, esotericism, initiatory
rites, and mysticism.” I would be

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reluctant to accept such a view.

From our survey of the recent criticism of Verne’s work it is apparent
that we are witnessing an evolution of critical attitude in France toward
the genres of which Verne’s work is representative: social utopia,
science fiction, and fantastic romance—genres long considered only from
narrow-minded points of view. The most important contemporary critics and
philosophers have contributed to the clarification of Verne’s very rich
and complex output. Step by step, eliminating many misreadings, they have
been winning for Verne a first-rank position in the history of French
literature. This evolution is of course related to the present upswing in
French studies of SF, which are showing signs of vitality after a long
period in which the neglect of SF was relieved only by archaic, gossipy,
and inadequate commentary.